This semester, I started my school's Philosophy class. I’ve always been very interested in Philosophy - I often find myself pondering the origins of the universe, the roots of human emotion, and the relationships between humans and other beings. As I’ve learned more about Philosophy, there was one particular concept that completely rattled how I viewed everything: Kant’s constructivism.
Immanuel Kant was perhaps one of the most influential philosophers in history. He proposed a theory called constructivism. This theory is so important because it was able to combine two other philosophical ideologies - rationalism and empiricism. Many deem Kant’s constructivism to be too difficult to understand (and thus I only learned about it in Philosophy instead of my other Social Studies classes), but I think the foundations of this ideology are pretty simple. First, I should explain what rationalism and empiricism are in order to set a foundation for constructivism.
Rationalism is the belief that humans have knowledge from reason and without having to experience anything first. The most influential Rationalist was Renee Descartes. Rationalists believe that humans are born with innate ideas. One of the most famous rational arguments is the cognito ergo sum, in which Descartes proves that he exists because he has the ability to think (“I think, therefore I am”). He further uses this argument to demonstrate the existence of God - since humans are imperfect and finite, and God is perfect and infinite, there is no way that humans could imagine God without God implanting the belief in perfection in our minds first. Therefore, a perfect and infinite being must be able to exist before an imperfect and finite being like ourselves could ever imagine God.
Empiricism is the polar opposite of rationalism - it’s the ideology that humans can only gain knowledge from experience, and no knowledge is derived from reason alone. The most influential empiricist was David Hume. To Hume, reason only demonstrated the relationships between experiences. However, because of his belief that all knowledge was grounded in experience, Hume’s ideology ended up being very skeptic. Experience was always subject to change when we couldn’t sense it. Therefore, the only reality that existed was the one we could view currently.
Constructivism combines both of these ideologies. Kant believed that reason and empiricism couldn’t exist without each other, which is why constructivism is also known as reasoned experience and experienced reason. Kant decrees that humans experience the world through reason - there’s no way that we could experience objective reality, because the way our brain perceives our surroundings interrupts that. Basically, it’s as if we’ve had sunglasses on our whole lives, but we’ve never been able to take them off. And we never will be able to, because we can’t jump out of our experience and compare true reality to it. Kant also argues that one cannot reason without any experience to reason about, and one cannot experience things without being able to reason and understand what they’re experiencing. In this way, experience and reason can’t exist without each other.
Learning about constructivism was especially earth-shattering for me because that meant everything I perceived was constructed out of my mind. The way I view reality is completely different than what reality actually is, because my brain has to process it before I perceive it. This means that everything around me could very well be a figment of my imagination. I could be in a coma in some science fiction world, and I would never be able to know if I were. The world around me could be black-and-white, but my brain could be perceiving color. Learning about this ideology completely frightened me, because everything I knew up until now could have been a lie.
After learning about constructivism, I decided to broaden my understanding by asking my friends about it. Of course, this could be fruitless if they’re all a figment of my imagination, but I figured that reasoning with them could demonstrate their real-ness to me. I first talked to my boyfriend who had already taken philosophy. He told me that it was possible that I could be in some brain vat somewhere hallucinating everything, but he told me to just enjoy it. This unsettled me at first, but then I remembered something fundamental in philosophy as well - in order for an idea to become knowledge, you must believe in it first. If I didn’t believe that I was in a brain vat, then I could completely refute constructivism and believe that I was perceiving reality. And my friend was right - even if I was in a hallucination, I really like my current reality. Ignorance is bliss.
I also talked to one of my friends on Saturday about this concept. We were at a Debate Tournament and had just qualified for the State Tournament. Amidst all my excitement, something dawned on me: what if none of this was real? What if this was all a figment of my imagination? Upon expressing that fear to her, she told me that she had to be real because in order for her not to be, she’d have to know every single moment of my life and every single moment of hers as well. Her argument does bear weight - if she were a figment of my imagination, shouldn’t I know more about her than what I have experienced?
After all of my pondering, I have decided to accept my current reality. It is possible that everything around me could be a facade, but I will never know whether it is. If everything around me is real, that gives me purpose and meaning in life. Ultimately, those two things outweigh everything else. I have decided that it is useless in trying to figure out the impossible, and I will remain satisfied with what is currently presented to me. I love my current reality, even if it’s all a dream.
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